VR can bring your loved ones "back to life"—but I wouldn't want to virtually meet my dad

After three and a half years, the novelty of being a Welsh person living in England hasn’t worn off. I’m regularly asked to “speak Welsh” in order to amaze and bemuse new friends, or am asked what my “favourite Welsh word” is. My answer is the usual cliché: the sometimes overused and always untranslatable hiraeth. The nearest I can get to translating it is: “longing for a time that may never have been.” This is a feeling of nostalgia, a desire for something just out of reach. Homesickness for a place to which you cannot return.

Many countries have similar, though not identical, phrases. The Portuguese, for example, have saudade—defined by artist Pei-Ying Lin as “melancholic incompleteness.” German has Sehnsucht, which can be used to describe a longing—a pining—for something unknown.

Perhaps such words identify a key truth of the human condition; our perpetual longing for a simpler, more innocent time, when less was at stake, when decisions seemed to matter less.

Hiraeth can hit at unpredictable times—at big life events, in the middle of the most boring mundanities. Not a day goes by without a pang of hiraeth crawling along my shoulders, urging me to find a way home, leaving me feeling like a character from a fairy tale when I finally admit that I cannot.

For me, it’s a feeling inextricably linked to losing my father as a child and longing to return to a time that seems unwaveringly “good”; like the time my brother and I danced with dad in my bedroom, blaring out the lyrics to “What a Fool Believes.”

Now, technology may have made it possible for me to rid myself of hiraeth, forever. Well, kind of.

Earlier this month, the Korean TV show Meeting You reunited a grieving mother with her late daughter through the power of virtual reality. Surrounded by greenscreens, and wearing a VR headset and a set of touch-sensitive gloves, the mother hears her computer-generated daughter call her name and run towards her. She reaches out to stroke her daughter’s hair, and both tell each other how much they have missed one another.

It is difficult not to be touched by the scene—by the magnificence of such a life-like recreation, and the injustice of watching a mother try to hold a daughter made of pixels.

“Mum, where were you?” the daughter asks.

“I was always here,” her mum replies, unable to hold back her tears, her hands empty. “I want to touch you,” she whispers, “just once.” She reaches out her arms to clutch the air before her, where her daughter should have been.

This most intimate of moments has been viewed on YouTube more than 12m times. And despite it being one of the most difficult viewing experiences I can recall, it’s easy to understand why it has captured the imagination of so many people.

It shows how technology can act as a portal into another world—and not just the world of game-makers and content creators, but our own inner lives. Personal worlds which, for years, we have believed to be impossible to return to.

VR offers us an opportunity to reach into the "looking-glass"; a looking-glass I am so tempted to fall through, just so I can return to that simpler time, to end my own hiraeth.

I know the moment I would return to. I think I even know what I would say. But if, by some bizarre circumstance, I am ever offered the opportunity to see my father again—this time through the glare of a VR headset—I will politely but firmly decline. That is despite wanting nothing more—truly, nothing more—than the chance to see him again.

Those pixels before my eyes would not make up the complexity of my father, a man who had lived several lives before I was even born. Would this VR-dad be able to tell me about his childhood? Would he be able to share stories from his rock and roll past? Tell me how he felt when he first met my mum? Would he recall the times I went with him to work? How my tiny hand would wrap itself around his fingers? How we’d take the long way home just to see the sun set on Betws mountain?

Would he have the same smile? Would the corners of his eyes crease as they did years ago when he looked upon my brother, or when he placed his arm around my mum? Would he be as forthright in telling us of his love? Would he still call my little brother "mate"? Would he, like me, have mourned the days we could not spend together? Or remember the ones we had?

How could those pixels answer the questions I have longed to ask for so many years? How could they show me that same love and affection, that rush of warmth I had felt singing “What a Fool Believes” in my bedroom? Pixels are just pixels—my dad was, and indeed is, so much more.

This is not virtual reality. This is the stuff of my favourite nightmares—the ones where I get to see my father’s face, knowing it is not real.

So, keep your greenscreens, your headsets, your cruel touch-sensitive gloves. And I will keep my hiraeth. Right next to the part of my brain that makes me smile whenever I hear the Doobie Brothers play on the radio.